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The Apocalypse of Abraham

H. F. D. Sparks

Both the pseudo-Athanasian Synopsis and the Stichometry of Nicephorus include ‘Abraham’ in their lists of apocryphal books;
but whether they are referring to our Apocalypse, or to our Testament, or to some other work bearing Abraham's name, it is
impossible to say. Priscillian is similarly vague when he asks whether anyone has ever ‘read a book of Abraham among the prophets
of the established canon’.
1
Prisc. Tract. iii.
Even more uncertain is the identity of the book (or books) ‘of the Three Patriarchs’ mentioned at the very end of the apocryphal
list in the well known passage in The Apostolic Constitutions (VI. xvi. 3) – is one book being referred to here or are three? Are the ‘three patriarchs’ referred to Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob (as we should naturally expect)? Or is the fact that they occur at the very end of the list (after ‘Jsaiah’ and ‘David’
and ‘Elijah’) significant, and are three later worthies therefore in mind?

Epiphanius, at first sight, is more definite. He records that among the apocryphal books used by the Sethians was one passing
under the name of Abraham ‘which also they assert to be a revelation’.
2
Epiph. Haer.
XXXIX. v. 1.
The obvious interpretation of this statement is that it is a reference to our Apocalypse. On the other hand, the Testament
contains not a little apocalyptic material; and this is recognised, for example, in the title of the Testament in the Rumanian
version (‘The Life and Death of our Father Abraham, the Righteous, written according to the Apocalypse …’). So there could
clearly be confusion between Apocalypse and Testament. The Sethians, about whom Epiphanius is writing, may have used either
the Apocalypse or the Testament, or, perhaps, another work incorporating material in one, or the other, or both, or neither.

Even greater uncertainty surrounds the interpretation of a passage in the Prologue to Palladius's Lausiac History. In the traditional text of this passage Palladius refers to ‘those who have written the lives of the Fathers, Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob, and Moses also and Elijah, and those who came after them’.
3
e.g. PG xxxiv. 1003–4 (reprinted from Ducaeus).
But the standard modern text reads ‘those who have written the lives of the Fathers, Abraham and those who came after him,
Moses and Elijah and John’.
4
Cuthbert Butler, The Lausiac History of Palladius, II (= TS
VI. ii; Cambridge, 1904), p. 11.
Whether or not Palladius knew three ‘Lives’ of all three patriarchs, or only a single ‘Life’ of Abraham, is for our present
purposes immaterial. What is important to note is that the description ‘Life’ fits the Testament of Abraham just as well as
it does the Apocalypse. Though it may well be that Palladius was referring to neither, but to a different work altogether,
now no longer extant.

In modern times the Apocalypse has been preserved only in Slavonic. Two editions of the Slavonic text were published independently
by N. S. Tikhonravov and I. I. Sreznevsky in
1863
from the 14th cent. Codex Sylvester (in which the Apocalypse appears as one item in a collection of lives of saints); and
these two editions of the text were followed by the publication of a facsimile edition of the MS itself in 1891. The Apocalypse
is also found in some of the MSS of the Palaea interpretata,
5
The Palaea is a compendium of miscellaneous items collected together primarily to show how the Old Testament was fulfilled
in the New. Individual items vary not a little from MS to MS. The basic collection is thought to have been made in Greek in
the 8th or 9th cents. and to have been translated into Slavonic in the 10th cent.: over the years it was much enlarged and
expanded. Besides The Apocalypse of Abraham the Palaea has preserved, among other things, The Ladder of Jacob, a number of
sagas about Cain, Abel, Lamech, and other Old Testament worthies, and, most important of all, the Slavonic version of The
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
and the texts of several of these MSS have been edited.

Our translation is based on the Sylvester text (= S). This text, however, is in many places manifestly corrupt and not infrequently
inferior to one or the other of the Palaea texts: in such cases the Palaea texts have been preferred. Three Palaea texts have been used: J = the 15th cent. MS of the Palaea in the Joseph Monastery at Volokolamsk (now in Moscow), edited by N. S. Tikhonravov; K = the 17th cent. MS originally in
Solovetsk, transferred to Kazan, and edited by I. Ya. Porfir'ev; and R = the MS dated AD
1494 in the Rumyantsev Museum (now the Lenin Library) in Moscow, edited by A. N. Pypin.

Most of the Palaea texts begin with a prologue not found in S: we have printed this prologue in full from R and K in the apparatus on p.
369
. Some Palaea texts (and among them R and K) continue immediately with the opening words of chap. i, although this makes a very awkward
connection; but others omit chaps. i–vi altogether and follow the prologue with the beginning of chap. vii (‘And Abraham,
having reasoned thus, came to his father, saying, Father Thara, fire is more honourable than images …’). R stops short at
the end of chap. viii – i.e. it contains only the ‘legendary’ part of the Apocalypse and not the more specifically ‘apocalyptic’.
J and K agree in offering a more satisfactory conclusion, which is lacking in S; but, even here, J seems to be defective at
the very end. And throughout there are many variants, omissions, additions, and displacements, by no means all of which are
recorded in our apparatus. Also noteworthy is the vacillation between the use of the first and third persons in the narrative
– the result of uncertainty in the tradition about whether Abraham himself is telling the story or someone else is telling
it about him. Moreover, the work known as ‘The Tale of the Just Man Abraham’,
6
Published most recently by P. A. Lavrov in SORYaS lxvii. 3 (St. Petersburg,
1899
), pp. 70–81.
although it cannot be described as an ‘abridgement’ of the Apocalypse, nevertheless shows clear traces of dependence on the
same tradition, and by its very existence provides an interesting illustration of how that tradition, in the Slavonic world
at least, was being continually adapted and re-shaped.

Despite the wide variations in the extant Slavonic texts of the Apocalypse, and the consequent difficulty in tracing any part
of it with any degree of certainty to a Greek or Semitic original, there can be no doubt at all that a very great deal of
the material contained in it is ultimately Jewish. Thus, the tradition that Israel's ancestors in Mesopotamia ‘even Terah,
the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor … served other gods’ is attested as early as Josh. xxiv. 2
. The Book of Jubilees relates how Abraham disputed with Terah about the folly of idol-worship and how he ‘set fire to the
idols’ house' in Ur of the Chaldees, and then how later in Haran, while observing ‘the signs of the stars’, he perceived at last the truth about the Creator, was thus led to forsake
all kinds of false worship, and set out at the Divine command on his journey to Canaan
7
Jub. xii. 1–8, 12, 16–28.
. And this account in Jubilees is repeated and developed in a variety of ways in later Jewish writings.

Yet this does not in itself prove that the author of the Apocalypse was a Jew. Christians read, not only their Bibles, but
also Jubilees and other Jewish literature. They were also in touch in certain areas and at certain times with not a little
Jewish oral tradition. There is clear evidence, from sources quite unconnected with the Apocalypse, that in this instance
they knew some, at least, of the extra-Biblical Jewish traditions about Abraham.
8
See especially L. Ginzberg, ‘Die Haggada bei den Kirchenvätern und in der apokryphischen Litteratur’ in Monatsschrift
für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, xliii (1899), pp. 486–490.
And there are in the Apocalypse several passages which show signs of Christian influence, particularly towards the end (and
pre-eminently chap. xxix). These passages may, of course, be Christian interpolations into an originally purely Jewish work.
But not necessarily so.

A possible indication of date is the description of the burning and pillaging of the Temple by the heathen in chap. xxvii.
This has been held to point to a date after AD 70. But chap. xxvii is in the second, ‘apocalyptic’, part of the book (ix–xxxi); so that for those who, like Ginzberg, think
that the ‘apocalyptic’ part was originally independent of the ‘legendary’ (i–viii), chap. xxvii is only evidence for the date
of the ‘apocalyptic’ part.

However, as the book stands, there are certainly connections between the two parts (chaps. xxv and xxvi make unambiguous references
to the contents of i–viii). Consequently, even if the two parts were originally independent, they have not simply been joined
together, but a definite attempt has been made to fuse them. And the fusion (if such it was) would seem to have been made
by the middle of the 4th cent. at the latest, since the Clementine Recognitions refer to Abraham,

‘who, since he was an astrologer, was able to recognise the Creator from the disposition and order of the stars, and understood
that all things are regulated by His providence. Whence also an angel standing by him in a vision, instructed him more fully about those things
which he was beginning to perceive. But he shewed him also what was destined for his race and posterity, and promised that
these places should not so much be given to them as restored’.
9
Clem. Recogn. i. 32 (Rufinus's translation of the Recognitions is to be dated c.
AD 400).

Nothing is said in the Recognitions about the source of the writer's information about Abraham at this point. Furthermore, the ‘legendary’ interest of the passage
is concentrated on Abraham's practice of astrology, rather than on his attack on idolatry, which is the main theme of the
first part of the Apocalypse. Even so, what is significant is that in the Recognitions the ‘legendary’ and the ‘apocalyptic’ elements in the Abraham tradition are closely associated, and that the latter part
of the passage quoted ‘forms (as Box puts it) a good description of the second or apocalyptic part of our Book’.
10
G. H. Box, The Apocalypse of Abraham, p. xvii.
In other words, Recognitions, i. 32, would seem to be evidence that the Apocalypse existed, at any rate in embryo, as early as c. 350, however much it may subsequently have been re-modelled, re-written, expanded, or interpolated, even perhaps as late
as the 16th or 17th cents. (the date of our latest Slavonic MSS).

Notes:

5
The Palaea is a compendium of miscellaneous items collected together primarily to show how the Old Testament was fulfilled in the New.
Individual items vary not a little from MS to MS. The basic collection is thought to have been made in Greek in the 8th or
9th cents. and to have been translated into Slavonic in the 10th cent.: over the years it was much enlarged and expanded.
Besides The Apocalypse of Abraham the Palaea has preserved, among other things, The Ladder of Jacob, a number of sagas about Cain, Abel, Lamech, and other Old Testament
worthies, and, most important of all, the Slavonic version of The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.